Quotations from conservative or Christian sources, speaking to the conditions of society, and countering the Left's phobia of Christian morality.

Thursday, June 1, 2017

False Ideas of Liberation

False ideas of liberation also have consequences when carried out in nonreligious pursuits. For example, movies, ads, and talk shows all suggest to men especially that either being single or acting that way offers varieties of physical pleasure and a sense of psychological conquest. Surveys show that the reality is very different, and just what we would expect from reading the Bible: Married sex beats unmarried sex in both quality and quantity. But that’s not what some people who view only the lies of both popular and high culture would suspect. A few of those who live the lie throughout their twenties and thirties may somehow skip their way through the minefields of abortion, broken hearts, and disease, but as young bodies become old, alienation and loneliness tend to edge out lust. When reality doesn’t sink in until age forty or fifty, lost decades cannot be replaced. The situation is better for people who get married, but then a false understanding of freedom frequently leads to divorce.

Ideologies have also benefited from grass-is-greener yearning coupled with misunderstanding. Ironically, many liberals during the 1930s embraced the greatest enslaving movement of the twentieth century—communism. Some in the 1960s became supporters of Cuba’s Castro, China’s Mao, or the Soviet Union’s Brezhnev, even though their prisons were filled with those who had defended family-based freedom. Communism’s bait-and-switch attracted those who did not realize the complications inherent in defining the results of Karl Marx’s mantra, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Beyond a bare minimum of calories and shelter, what are needs, as opposed to wants and desires? “Power to the people,” but which people? The classic Marxist saying should more accurately have concluded, “To each according to his demand for power—and his viciousness toward those seen as obstacles."